Paul Blomfield – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills
The below Parliamentary question was asked by Paul Blomfield on 2016-05-25.
To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, what estimate the Student Loans Company has provided to his Department of the costs of the preparation, introduction and administration of the amendments to the fees and student support system in England arising from the (a) replacement of maintenance grants by maintenance loans, (b) introduction of the postgraduate loan scheme, (c) extension of maintenance loans to part-time students, (d) extension of advanced learner loans to those aged 19 years and above and (e) Teaching Excellence Framework.
Joseph Johnson
The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) fully funds the cost to the Student Loans Company (SLC) of implementing Higher and Further Education student finance policy in England. Funding is allocated on a demand-led basis whereby BIS requests services, SLC estimates the cost of delivery and then BIS pays the costs in full.
As set out in the SLC’s public Annual Performance and Resource Agreement (APRA) for financial year 2015-16, BIS made approximately £8.8m available to SLC to meet the estimated costs of implementing all new policies related to student support for Higher and Further Education in England, including (but not exclusively) the implementation of policies a, b and d above.
Overall implementation costs for individual policies are usually spread over a number of financial years reflecting the different stages of the implementation process. The amount of funding to be made available to SLC for financial year 2016-17, including for delivery of policies a-e above, will be confirmed in this year’s APRA and published on SLC’s website shortly.
